Pemaquid Harbor

Author's Comments

Most travelers heading down the Pemaquid peninsula are aiming for the lighthouse, and they drive right past the harbor without quite registering it. That is fine by me. Pemaquid Harbor is small, working, and almost entirely unconcerned with being looked at, which is exactly what makes it worth the detour. I come in early August, before six, when the lobstermen are loading traps and the bay is still glass. The light at that hour does a particular thing to a working harbor - it picks out the chipped paint on a buoy, the salt on a coil of rope, the orange of someone's bib overalls against the gray of weathered cedar. Nothing here is staged. The shacks lean the way they have leaned for decades. The boats are named for daughters and grandmothers and a few jokes that only make sense to the people who tied them up last night. The trick is restraint. There is a temptation, in a place this picturesque, to photograph everything, and the result is usually nothing. I try to pick one boat, one stack of traps, one corner of the co-op dock, and stay with it long enough to see how the light moves across it. The wide shot of the harbor will be there too, and it is worth making, but the photographs I keep are the smaller ones. A note on manners. This is a working waterfront, not a set. Stay out of the way of anyone carrying anything. Park where you are told. The lobstermen are generally kind to people with cameras as long as the people with cameras remember whose office they are standing in.

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